Results for “climate change” 362 found
Are climate models like economics models?
Here’s another reader request:
You’ve spent a lot of time studying economic models. You probably have an opinion about their overall reliability.
How should that opinion influence your view of the issue of
environmental change, given that many of the inferences about such
change come from general climate models that are, in some ways, very
similar to economic models?
I would prefer betting markets, but I don’t think they would suggest something much different from the current scientific consensus. Economic models aside, economic empirics give us every reason to believe that (apart perhaps from environmental issues) today’s mixed economies with democratic capitalism have produced, and will continue to produce, entirely satisfactory outcomes. Make of climate models what you may, there is lots of evidence that a) biodiversity is being hammered, and b) climate change will bring desertification, drought, and possibly coastal flooding to many parts of the world, among other dilemmas. I don’t have a lot of faith in the exact predictive powers of climate models, or for that matter economic models, but uncertainty about outcomes should make us worry more not less. Uncertainty usually has two tails, not just one.
What I’ve been reading
1. Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. An amazing book, full of life and energy on every page, and yes there are 605 of them. Imagine if Camille Paglia had stuck with it and produced case studies. The main problem is simply that most people don’t know or care about Burton and Taylor any more?
2. David Caron, Michael Healy, 1873-1941, An Túr Gloine’s Stained Glass Pioneer. An excellent book, can it be said that Michael Healy is Ireland’s fourth greatest stained glass artist? Clarke, Geddes, and Hone would be the top three? It is good to see him getting this attention, but what will happen when so many Irish churches are decommissioned or abandoned or simply never seen? What does that equilibrium look like? All the more reason to invest in this book. What an underrated European tradition.
3. Paul Seabright, the subtitle says it all, The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People. I’ve just started to crack this one open, Paul’s books are always very smart.
4. Sahar Akhtar, Immigration & Discrimination: (un)welcoming others. Can the idea of wrongful discrimination be applied to immigration decisions? Maybe you believe this is a pure and simple matter of national autonomy, but what if the potential immigrants are from a former and wronged colony? From an island nation perishing due to climate change? Or they were previously pushed off territory that is now part of the host nation? And yet open borders as an idea also does not work — how should one fit all these pieces together?
5. Austin Bush, The Food of Southern Thailand. The best book I know of on southern Thailand flat out. This one has recipes of course, but also photos, maps, anecdotes, and plenty of history. The food is explained in conceptual terms. Recommended, for all those with an interest.
6. Michael Cook, A History of the Muslim World: From its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity. Mostly ends at 1800, this will become one of the standard, must-read histories of Islam and its multiple homes. The section on India, which is what I have been reading, is strongly conceptual and novel compared to other survey books such as Hourani. At the very least a good book, possibly a great book.
My interview with Sam Matey
He is a podcaster who mainly does transcripts. Our discussion was largely but by no means entirely about climate change, here is one excerpt:
Sam: And India also is building huge amounts of new renewable and other electricity generating capacity. They’re building electric rail networks. They seem to be hitting their stride in a way that China was in about 2000 or 2005. I’m feeling optimistic about the rise of a new broadly-speaking-democratic powerful country in global markets and geopolitics.
Tyler: I would add the cautionary note that hardly anyone in India cares about climate change. Now, you may think they care about correlates to climate change, such as high temperatures in Delhi in the difficult months. But it’s very far from a national priority with any party that I’m aware of or any segment of the electorate. Air pollution is a major issue. But if there’s a way to fix air pollution, say through natural gas, that doesn’t, to a comparable degree, fix climate change, it could prove very popular in India.
So truly green energy has to be very cheap with the intermittency problem truly solved for India to make the transition, because there is not ideological momentum there at all.
And:
Sam: I agree that there’s not going to be a huge ideological drive to solve climate change in China or India, but I suspect that they will be doing a lot of the stuff that would have been considered a really ambitious climate change solving program 10 years ago, nonetheless, just for other reasons. Does that make sense?
Tyler: It makes sense, but keep in mind there’s also going to be technological progress for fossil fuels. And there has been; fracking was a big, big increase in productivity. It could spread to more parts of the world quite easily. The energy demands of the world, over some period of time, they could go up by 3x or 4x. And to think green energy will absorb all of that and cut into the current flows, I think it’s a bigger requirement than is often imagined.
Again, I wouldn’t say I’m pessimistic, but I’m not optimistic either. I’m genuinely uncertain.
And this:
Tyler: Maybe, but there’s two sources of quite green energy that have been declining. Nuclear we’ve already mentioned, but also hydroelectric. So some things are leaving the scene. And I would just say in general, looking at history, I’m very cautious about extrapolating either positive or negative trends. There’s so many efforts to do so. So in the 70s, there’s this great fear of overpopulation. Right now, there’s this great fear of a fertility crisis and underpopulation.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t think about either one of those, but it could well be neither comes to pass. Extrapolating current trends can rather rapidly lead us astray because of the power of the exponent. But maybe the world is just messy and not all that exponential.
In the latter part of the dialogue we talk about Morocco, Kenya, Mexico, Ethiopia, and the productivity crisis in Canada, among other issues. Will Buddhism rise or fall in influence? And what does it mean to suggest that books are overrated?
DEI vs. the Chips Act
The Hill has a good op-ed by Matt Cole and Chris Nicholson on how labor and DEI regulations are strangling the CHIPS act. It’s somewhat over the top, failure is overdetermined, but this is an important op-ed and directionally correct.
The Biden administration recently promised it will finally loosen the purse strings on $39 billion of CHIPS Act grants to encourage semiconductor fabrication in the U.S. But less than a week later, Intel announced that it’s putting the brakes on its Columbus factory. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has pushed back production at its second Arizona foundry. The remaining major chipmaker, Samsung, just delayed its first Texas fab.
This is not the way companies typically respond to multi-billion-dollar subsidies. So what explains chipmakers’ apparent ingratitude? In large part, frustration with DEI requirements embedded in the CHIPS Act.
…The law contains 19 sections aimed at helping minority groups, including one creating a Chief Diversity Officer at the National Science Foundation, and several prioritizing scientific cooperation with what it calls “minority-serving institutions.” A section called “Opportunity and Inclusion” instructs the Department of Commerce to work with minority-owned businesses and make sure chipmakers “increase the participation of economically disadvantaged individuals in the semiconductor workforce.”
…Handouts abound. There’s plenty for the left—requirements that chipmakers submit detailed plans to educate, employ, and train lots of women and people of color, as well as “justice-involved individuals,” more commonly known as ex-cons. There’s plenty for the right—veterans and members of rural communities find their way into the typical DEI definition of minorities. There’s even plenty for the planet: Arizona Democrats just bragged they’ve won $15 million in CHIPS funding for an ASU project fighting climate change.
…tired of delays at its first fab, [TSMC]flew in 500 employees from Taiwan. This angered local workers, since the implication was that they weren’t skilled enough. With CHIPS grants at risk, TSMC caved in December, agreeing to rely on those workers and invest more in training them. A month later, it postponed its second Arizona fab.
Now TSMC has revealed plans to build a second fab in Japan. Its first, which broke ground in 2021, is about to begin production. TSMC has learned that when the Japanese promise money, they actually give it, and they allow it to use competent workers. TSMC is also sampling Germany’s chip subsidies, as is Intel.
Intel is also building fabs in Poland and Israel, which means it would rather risk Russian aggression and Hamas rockets over dealing with America’s DEI regime. Samsung is pivoting toward making its South Korean homeland the semiconductor superpower after Taiwan falls.
…The CHIPS Act’s current identity as a jobs program for favored minorities means companies are forced to recruit heavily from every population except white and Asian men already trained in the field.
Remember that there is an Extreme Shortage of High-IQ Workers. The United States is big and rich and can afford to handicap itself in many ways but less so when it comes to high-end semiconductor manufacturing, the most difficult and complicated manufacturing process ever attempted by human beings. For that we want the Dream Team, the very best, chosen on merit alone.
Addendum: Scott Lincicome has a good overview of the problem.
The Continuing Influence of Fast Grants
Fast Grants, the rapid COVID funding mechanism created by Tyler, Patrick Collison and Patrick Hsu continues to inspire change around the world. Jano Costard, the Head of Challenges at SPRIND, the German Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation writes:
Lots to learn from Fast Grants! Can we implement it in a public institutions that face a different set of rules (and legacy)? We tried with the Challenge program at the German Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation, SPRIND, and succeeded, mostly.
While Fast Grants gave out grants in the first round in 48h, we haven’t been that speedy. Our last Challenge had 2 weeks and 2 days from deadline until final decision in a two stage evaluation procedure. Those last two days were spent doing pitches and the teams were informed of the decision the following night. So, it rather compares to the 2 weeks decision time Fast Grants has for later rounds.
During Covid, speed was of the utmost importance. But speed remains crucial now. Teams we fund have applications with other public funders undecided after more than 2 years. These delays accumulate and matter even for pressing but slowly advancing threats like climate change. No cleantech solution that is still in the lab today will have a meaningful impact on achieving our climate goals for 2030! It’s not only the R&D that takes time, getting to meaningful scale quickly will be much harder. That’s why there is no time to waste at the start of the process.
Fast grants has two important advantages when it comes to implementation: private funds and limited legacy. Public institutions often face additional rules and procedures that slow down processes. But this is not inevitable.
For SPRIND Challenges, we implemented a funding mechanism that left room for unbureaucratic processes and provided solutions for challenges that public funders or procurers typically face. This mechanism, called pre-commercial procurement, has been established by the European Commission in 2007 but was used in Germany only 1 time until we started to use it in 2021. This is also due to legacy in processes. Institutions execute their work in part based on an implicit understanding of how things need to be, about what is allowed and what is not. This might lead them to ignore new and beneficial instruments just because “this can’t be true”. Even worse, if new mechanisms are adopted by an institution with strong inherent understand of what can and cannot work, they run the risk of overburdening new and beneficial mechanisms with previous processes and requirements. In the end, a funding mechanism is just a tool. It needs to be used right.
SPRIND had the benefit of being a newly established public institution with important liberties in doing things differently and it’s lead by a Director @rafbuff who, at the time, had no experience in the public sector. So, did we find the ultimate way to research and innovation funding with SPRIND Challenges? Certainly not! Improvements are necessary but sometimes hard to achieve (looking at you, state-aid-law!).
Impressive! And check out SPRIND, they are funding have some interesting projects!
Sentences to ponder
We find that standard population growth projections imply larger reductions in [per capita] income than even the most extreme widely-adopted climate change scenario.
Note these results are referring to population growth, not shrinkage. Of course those of you who remember Paul Ehrlich and his “population bomb” campaign may be skeptical. Still, if you think there are countries or regions that are just not going to grow much in absolute terms, exactly why is this wrong? Ehrlich was clearly wrong about countries that were set to grow — is that everyone?
Should per capita or total income be the standard here?
That sentence is from a macroeconomics paper, here is more, via Robin Hanson.
Sunday assorted links
1. Glenn wants to ask it “why should I listen to my parents?”
2. What Soderbergh saw and read in 2023.
3. Hermit crabs are wearing our plastic.
5. Cowen’s Second Law: “Extreme metal guitar skills linked to intrasexual competition, but not mating success.”
6. Why strip malls are having a revival.
7. Hollywood movies losing favor in China (NYT).
8. The new economics of climate change (NYT). A very good piece. I thought one lesson was how much economists are so often slaves to politics — especially Democratic party politics — although I am not sure the author intended that messsage.
Arizona fact of the day
Arizona now uses 3 percent less water than it did in 1957, despite having a population that’s mushroomed more than 555 percent since then.
That is from Tom Zoellner in the NYT. It is a good piece more generally, and it helps explain why real estate prices in the Southwest have proven robust in light of climate change concerns.
Sunday assorted links
1. What Kent Hendricks learned this year, always good.
2. NYT calls for the total destruction of all extant major LLMs. Of course this should be a scandal, and considered an example of unacceptable predatory behavior, but it isn’t. How is this different from what a super-villain would say? Brian Chau, telephone!
3. “A sweeping purge of Chinese generals has weakened the People’s Liberation Army, exposing deep-rooted corruption that could take more time to fix and slow Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s military modernization drive amid geopolitical tensions, analysts say.” And is the CCP moving on Alipay?
5. The sources of cost inflation at Auburn University (WSJ).
6. The kinds of questions people are asking GOAT. Galbraith gets his chance!
7. Milei kissing his girlfriend. And Milei responding to a critic on socialism.
8. Maxim Lott monitors political bias in chatbots.
9. Hannah Ritchie sanity on climate change (NYT).
Earth fact of the day
This week, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London published the latest edition of its authoritative annual Armed Conflict Survey, and it’s not predicting much peace for the holidays. It paints a grim picture of rising violence in in many regions, of wars chronically resistant to broking of peace. The survey — which addresses regional conflicts rather than the superpower confrontation between China, Russia, the US and its allies — documents 183 conflicts for 2023, the highest number in three decades…
The intensity of conflict has risen year on year, with fatalities increasing by 14% and violent events by 28% in the latest survey. The authors describe a world “dominated by increasingly intractable conflicts and armed violence amid a proliferation of actors, complex and overlapping motives, global influences and accelerating climate change.”
Here is more from Max Hastings at Bloomberg.
Good Developments in Africa
The Guardian: Visas to visit Kenya are to be scrapped for other African nationals from next year as part of a movement towards opening up trade and travel within the continent.
“By the end of this year, no African will be required to have a visa to come to Kenya,” Kenya’s president, William Ruto, said at a climate change conference in Congo-Brazzaville.
Costly and time-consuming visa requirements, as well as high air fares, have long created barriers to inter-African travel for African passport holders; 32 out of 54 African countries still require the nationals of half or more countries on the continent to obtain a visa.
Good. Kenya should also scrap visas for US and European citizens!
This is part of Africa’s move to free trade with the The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the largest free trade area in the world measured by the number of countries participating. Eventually AfCTA will cover 1.3 billion people across 55 countries.
Visas can have very high costs in reducing travel and trade. Africa is moving in the right direction. The US and Europe in contrast are adding visa requirements and the wait times to get a US visa are an absurd embarrassment.
Monday assorted links
1. Those new service sector jobs: therapists for climate change anxiety (NYT).
2. Defunct airports of Southeast Asia.
3. Eli Dourado on personal aviation and the coming revolution.
4. The coolest neighborhoods in the world? (can’t say I agree with the list…cool for wimps maybe!)
6. “About 20 per cent of 650 Protestant ministers in Korea recently surveyed by the Ministry Data Institute said they have used ChatGPT to create sermons and about 60 per cent of them found ChatGPT useful in coming up with ideas for sermons.” (FT)
Friday assorted links
A new estimate of costs from global warming
The paper, by David J. Winter and Manuela Kiehl, is titled “Long-term Macroeconomic Effects of Shifting Temperature Anomaly Distributions.” I’ve posted a few papers showing results like “5 to 10 percent of global gdp by 2100” (try here and here), and I promised I would pass along further and different estimates. Here is the abstract:
This paper uses panel data on 201 countries from 1960 to 2019 to estimate the long-term macroeconomic effects of shifting temperature anomaly distributions. We find that rising average temperature anomalies from historical norms caused by global warming have negative, non-linear impacts on GDP growth. By additionally accounting for volatility and tail composition of the temperature anomaly distribution across a geospatial grid and across time, our approach is a methodological step towards quantifying the macroeconomic impacts of broader climate change. Projected damages are far greater than estimated in previous studies that have focussed on quantifying the macroeconomic impacts of average temperature levels only. Furthermore, in contrast to these studies which suggest that cooler countries would benefit from global warming, our damage forecasts see all countries face significant losses in productivity growth beyond optimum global warming levels of 0.3°C. Against a counterfactual scenario in which temperatures are held flat at today’s levels, 2 to 2.6°C of warming versus pre-industrial levels by 2050 has the potential to reduce projected global output by 30 to 50%. Warming in the range of 4-5°C by 2100 would lead to economic annihilation, consistent with scientific research on mass extinction thresholds and tipping points.
Now I am not sure I understand this paper correctly, but the authors don’t seem to take mitigation or adjustment into account, which would be far greater for sustained global warming than they would be for periodic, earlier temperature anomalies (Lucas critique!). And I don’t see they have any real empirical argument, from existing data, that “economic annihilation” would occur in some of their scenarios.
So I am skeptical. Nonetheless I promised you all further reports, and here is one of them. At the very least you can see what “moves” are needed to get the projected costs of global warming to go higher than are currently estimated. I would gladly consider more papers in this vein, and this is an important and underdiscussed question, at least from a rational point of view.
Via tekl.
They are solving for the equilibrium
Canada is pushing the United States and other major economies to follow through on pledges to phase out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies, which have soared despite the growing threat of climate change.
Such subsidies hit records last year, according to several watchdog groups, including one that estimated that major world economies — members of the G-20 cooperation forum — surpassed $1 trillion in subsidies for the first time in 2022. That’s a fourfold increase over subsidy levels in 2010, the year after G-20 nations agreed to phase out support for fossil fuels.